Getting Killed, and Stopping It

You can be killed by another player. It is the only thing in the game that takes Respect off you, and it is deliberately slow, loud, and stoppable — nobody dies to a single click.

It takes three steps, hours apart

1. Someone puts you in hospital. That is the ordinary attack, and it needs your health at zero. The Street page shows everyone's condition — Healthy, Hurt, Badly hurt, Critical — so a hunter can tell when you are nearly there.
2. They call a hit. This kills nobody. It starts a public clock, and you and your entire crew are told the moment it happens.
3. They come back and finish it. Only after the clock runs out, and only the person who called it. There is no roll at this stage — if the clock is out and nothing stopped them, it lands.

The gap between steps 2 and 3 is the whole design. It exists so that being offline when someone calls a hit is not a death sentence.

Two ways to stop it

Stand guard. Any crewmate in the same city can post up over a marked member. The finisher has to go through them first — put the guard in hospital, and only then can they get to the target.

Heal them out. Anyone in the same city with enough medical product can pull a marked player out of the hospital, and that takes the hit off entirely. This is what the hospital pharmacy is quietly for. Rescues get more expensive each time the same person is pulled out inside the same window — a crew can save someone, but not forever.

What it costs you

You lose what you are carrying: cash on hand, weapons, vehicles and any drugs on you. You keep everything banked in your safe, your property and real estate, your skills, and your crew.

You also drop one rank, and enough Respect goes with it that the demotion sticks — this is the one exception to Respect only ever climbing. You cannot commit one more crime and be straight back where you were.

What it costs them

Killing is not free. Whatever cash you were carrying is put straight back out as a bounty on your killer's head, payable to anybody who collects. And for a while afterwards you can attack the person who killed you regardless of the usual Profile matchmaking band — the one situation in the game where someone far out of your league is fair game.

There is no limit on how often somebody can kill. The Nerve, the Heat, and the price that lands on their own head are the limit.

The families are in this too

You voted for the other crews to be part of it, so they are, both ways round.

You can kill them. An NPC goes down and gets marked exactly like a player. Kill a crew's boss and that crew stops contesting territory until they get back on their feet, which takes a little while — decapitating a family is a real, if temporary, way to take the heat off a district you want.

They can put a price on your life. When a crew holds a grudge against you they may post a kill contract rather than an ordinary one. It shows on the Bounty Board marked as such, anyone can take it, and it pays considerably more than a normal contract — because whoever collects has to put you in hospital, call it, and come back, with your crew in the way the whole time.

The important difference: a kill contract only pays if you actually die. Beating you up does not collect it. You will be told the moment one is posted on you.